Is English more difficult to learn than spanish?
Is English harder to learn than spanish?
10 Answers
English pronounciation is definitely harder for non-native speaker because it is not always phoentic or consisent for example sour and tour are spelled the with same last three letters but are pronounced differently There are lot of words that sound the same but are spelled differently. In my experience in trying to learn Spanish I find some of the grammarrules a little tricky.
Mostly it depends where you start from.
Let's review the disadvantages. Both English and Spanish, and many other natural languages:
- Have a large number of unique, odd grammar rules that apply only in certain cases.
- Contain large numbers of idioms, short phrases that cannot be understood from their component words. Native speakers usually never notice how many idioms and weird grammar rules exist!
- There are also numerous "fixed phrases" such as "in bed" and "go home" that can be understood, but violate the normal grammar rules (e.g. you wouldn't say "in kitchen" or "go store") and therefore make the language more confusing to learn.
- Are highly homophonous, i.e. contain many important words that sound the same but have very different meanings. Spanish words like que/qué, si/sí, se/sé, and English words like "like", "as", for/four, to/too/two, no/know, are both very common and also ambiguous.
- Have a very large vocabulary.
- Have numerous verb tenses (although Spanish is bigger).
- Has holes, where no word exists for a simple, atomic idea. For example, Spanish has no direct equivalent of "somewhere", "everywhere", "to agree", "let's ___", so one must use a phrase like "en alguna parte", "en todas partes", "estar de acuerdo" or a simpler substitute like "sí" instead of "estoy de acuerdo". No doubt English has holes too, but I am not very aware of them.
I suspect the vocabulary of English is larger than Spanish because English contains words imported from so many other languages. We also have some subcultures with their own dialects of English (e.g. Ebonics), and I have noticed that English movies generally expect the watcher to understand any dialect that is used in the movie... but maybe Spanish is the same? Spanish gets much larger if you count verb conjugations, but that's not really fair.
English disadvantages:
- Has non-phonetic spelling. The vowels are especially unpredictable in English, but even the consonants are not reliable (we have random double consonants, imported words like "indict", and vestigial spellings like "where" and "their"). Comparitively, this is the biggest problem with English by far.
- Has complex syllables: consider one-syllable words like "strange" and "glimpsed". This is difficult if your native tongue is Spanish or another language with simple syllables.
- Has many different contrastive sounds, technically called phonemes. Spanish has 25 phonemes (5 vowels, 20 consonants, and it doesn't even need the entire alphabet!) while English has closer to 40 -- and some of our phonemes do double-duty as consonants and vowels, such as R (dirt, purr - the R is called 'syllabic R'), L (dimple), N (happen) - note, I'm American, other dialects may work differently. Again, this is difficult for Spanish speakers or anyone whose language does not include most of those phonemes already.
- Has contractions. Of course, this is an advantage for concision (conciseness), but it is a disadvantage for learning.
- Has some irregular plurals (and more complex regular plurals than Spanish)
- Although the verbs are simpler than Spanish, the meaning of a verb can change as you add 'particles', e.g.: for get: get in (a car), get out (a gun), get up (in the morning), get at (a point), get with (a girl). Sometimes the meaning is predictable (good), sometimes unpredictable (bad).
Spanish disadvantages:
- Has an extraordinarily complex verb system. I couldn't believe at first how big it is. Thank God for phonetic spelling, I don't know how I could have learned it otherwise.
- Has genders. It is a constant burden to remember them, and note that even if you already speak a language with two genders, it doesn't help you very much to learn Spanish, because each language chooses genders independently for the same objects.
- Requires adjectives to agree in gender and number. Ditto for articles (un/el). For me the hardest part is trying to pick the correct pronoun for "it": lo, la, ella or él.
- Has a more complex pronoun system, with 5 types of pronouns vs 2 types in English.
- Has some extra ambiguity in its pronouns, and because they are usually omitted. Consider the different meanings of "está aquí": he's here, she's here, it's here, even you're here. I often have difficulty following Spanish because I don't know the subject of the sentence.
I suspect English is harder objectively, because its spelling is not consistent with pronounciation. And it is probably more difficult for Spanish people to speak English correctly than the other way around, because English has many more sounds and complex syllables. However, if you are starting from a language with a rich set of sounds, English might not be so hard.
On the other hand, the Spanish verb system is a major challenge. It is probably easier to get started in English, because you don't need to spend much time learning the verb system. The base verb is almost always enough to communicate. Everyone understands "He go to the store" (even though it is wrong), and you can easily add tenses like "He did go to the store", "He will go to the store", "He is going to the store" (-ing is perfectly regular in English). But although it may be easy to start talking, you'll need to study and practice a long time before you understand someone that is talking to you.
Finally, I would point out that English people learning Spanish, and Spanish people learning English, both have it easy compared to Chinese people learning English or Spanish. Spanish and English are in the same language family so the grammar and vocabulary of both languages have much in common.
English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. I've heard that Basque and Chinese might be harder. English is an odd language. Its roots are Germanic, but it has had a Latin grammar imposed on it by the early clergy in England. Then the Normans invaded and inserted a bunch of French words into our vocabulary.
Spanish is by far the easiest natural language to learn. I'm a native English speaker and have studied Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Japanese. There's not doubt about it. They claim Esperanto is easier to learn, but a lot of that was modeled on Spanish, it's an artificial language, and no one really speaks it.
English's grammar is extremely easy to learn, but it's spelling (orthography) and pronunciation are much more difficult to learn.
Spanish's grammar is much more difficult to learn, but the spelling and pronunciation are extremely easy to learn.
:o) Adela
Well, I¨ve done German, Swedish, a bit of Finnish, and now Spanish, and of those, Spanish seems the easiest, as it is the only one that is both phonetic, AND has a relatively simple grammar (though the verb form variety does keep it from being truly easy)
I think English would be SO hard to learn just because of no real phonetic system, and thus completely inconsistent spelling. Witness Rough, Through, Dough, Bough etc etc.
On the other hand, English has pretty darn simple grammar and little gender, conjugation, or adjective agreement to contend with.
If it weren´t for spelling, English would be easiest, so I guess it just depends if someone is good at rote memorization. If so, English wouldn´t be too bad.
I´m horrible at it, so I´m darn glad it was my freebie.
Btw, Finnish, complexity wise, even without gender, and with phonetics, was still the most ridiculous task I¨ve ever attempted (and failed at) Only think making it easier than Japanese (which I know a very tiny amount about) is that it has a familiar alphabet.
Similar thread link text. My native tongue is French, my second language is English (I live in the U.S.) and now learning Spanish. English can be tricky at times but really not that hard to learn. American is cannibalized English lol.
I believe the hard part of learning a new language is to understand and accept the differences in the cultures. One that knows nothing about the culture and origins of the country will never become fluent where fluent means not only speaking the tongue but also fitting in the environment. A very typical example of this is Japanese where words are not only word but they also express an attitude, a feeling, a position. For example a verb is a verb, no surprise, but if you add the letter O before it then it becomes a mark of respect. Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu where Yoroshiku means good/fine, negai is a request. Translated in English it becomes "Nice to meet you" but in Japanese is means something like "I kindly request/wish of you to treat me well" (correction plz if I'm wrong.)
A language reflects the attitude of a culture, learn that 1st. French are arrogant and so is their language. Japanese are very respectful. German is aggressive. Spanish is singing, it's oozing sun.
In my experience, english is easier...
To my mind, Spanish is more difficult than English
English is, in my view, one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. I don't intend to explore the origen of the langauge as I have briefly touched on this in another posting and others have explained it and will continue to explain it much better than I can. Nor do I intend to begin to explain why it is such a difficult language to master I have lived most of my life in England and although born in Peru (please see Profile for further details if interested) I have spoken English from a young age. When you consider how long an average child can take to achieve a basic level of language skill so that they can communicate with reasonably fluency in English by the age of 5 can attain an intermediate level by around 12years of age and a very advanced level /fluency l by 18 you can begin to grasp how complex English is, as a foreign language, to learn . I used to help to teach young children 5- 8 years in a primary school for over 12 years and have had contact young people aged 5-12 years for many years.
How difficult learning English will be will depend on certain factors: 1. Your inborn ability to learn langauges 2. The opportunities you have to live among native speakers and become immersed in the langauge in this case English 3. The amount of time and effort you are willing to invest in learning the language - this becomes easier if you attend primary school as a child in that country - adults often find it harder to learn langauges but everyone is different 4. The amount of support you receive to develop your oral and written langauge schools This list is by no means complete but offers a good, basic guide. Children tend to absorb language skills and usually learn new languages more quickly than English. Living in a country immersed in the language is, for most people - if not all, the quickest way to learn a new language. By 'immersed', I mean surrounded by native speakers constantly speaking the langauge. The next best way is to seek out a skilled native teacher/speaker of the language you are wanting to learn and begin lessons with them in a small group or privately.
They each have their ups and downs. My native language is English and I am trying to learn Spanish. I find that grammar rules and sentence structure in Spanish is a little odd. I think it is easier to get the point across in Spanish than in English.
However, in English the words are a lot harder. We have several words that mean the same thing, words that are spelled the same and sound different, etc. I find that basic sentence structure in English is easier. You can get the point across very easily in English, but you have to be able to understand the other person's big words.
